I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they felt obliged to pack in too dang much Content with this new direction of theirs
It didn’t have the guts to straight-up make big empty landscapes like SotC. There’s always “stuff” in them. I wouldn’t say the problem is “content” – it’s remarkably sparing with stuff like cutscenes, and the highly designed areas like Eventide Island are highlights of the game. The problem is the game is anxious that the player may not feel adequately rewarded from their exploration and can’t let the wild stand on its own. You have an exploitative relationship with the landscape that’s best exemplified by the incentive to murder every elegant wild animal in sight for meat you don’t even need.
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interesting. that definitely sounds like the sort of thing that wouldn’t really have come out from prototyping in a NES zelda-style engine, as they apparently did…
I won’t be playing this for a few more months in all likelihood, so looking forward to reading more impressions
I think it did partly come out of the NES Zelda prototype, which implemented a lot of these collection mechanics. You can’t appreciate an NES Zelda landscape like John Muir, it’s a bunch of abstract iconography. On the concept art side they came up with these sweeping vistas which can stand on their own. The final game mushes the concepts together and there’s some tension between them, I think.
When most hilltops have a Korok seed on them, it becomes a disappointment in the rare cases where you don’t find one. And they seem to have resolved this problem in the direction of slapping more and more Korok seeds, and ore, and useful plants all over the place such that almost nowhere you decide to go on a whim will “waste” your time.
It feels more exciting against Minecraft/DayZ-derived survival games; Nintendo’s managed as many useful innovations against them as Halo:CE brought to shooters. Particularly flat, temporary progress and scattered ‘level elements’ will be very evident.
I think it has less to say against Horizon and other AAA open-world games, where the primary design challenge is, ‘how do we keep our content from seeming repetitive and samey?’ The current wisdom is highly-Witcher 3 influenced and is moving towards conversation systems and bespoke narrative content (WARNING: content must be high quality to hold value!) and Nintendo’s piles of bespoke content – well, I don’t have the foggiest how you would even go about building those in a compartmenalized AAA studio where the slightest toy takes months to build at fidelity. Midsize teams will better be able to build strong systemic interactions because they’re willing to sacrifice that fidelity.
But they made great progress in building a simplistic 3D combat system that doesn’t require expertise or high cognitive load while also not reverting to the vagaries of Assassin’s Creed/Arkham-style button prompts (maybe this is my hobbyhorse because I’m too close but ugh).
If we’re very, very lucky we’ll see the light-hand guidance of new Zelda applied to open-world but I doubt anyone will be that brave; current thinking is that supporting exploration gameplay like that is nice but it’s more important to make sure no one gets left behind, so the most you get is toggleable minimaps and still no design around players finding locales for themselves.
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I started to get this sense after 5 hours completing the intro. I think ‘what the player doesn’t know, but wants to know’ is the primary currency of these games and the vast unknown map really helps but as I start to grasp the range of rewards they have it shrinks. I’m glad that the Koroks don’t seem to be a real reward, though, mostly the game just acknowledging that I did a thing.
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A book I’m currently reading, After Nature, is partly about the history of Americans’ ideological relationship to nature, from the pilgrims, to the pioneers, to the romantics, to the progressives. One passage distinguishes the beautiful from the sublime. Beautiful landscapes are soft grassy rolling hills and farmland – lived-in landscapes, under human control and scale, hospitable. Sublime landscapes are pure, hostile, human-dwarfing wildernesses such as the Grand Canyon or outer space, that awe us with their proof that nature is not designed for human purposes. Muir’s innovation was to create an explicit school of thought that appreciates the sublime for its own sake, as an almost religious experience.
This game is supposedly about the wild, but it constantly reveals how it’s by and for humans. The real wild does not care, God didn’t put some prize on top of Everest to satisfy climbers, they need to discover their own satisfaction.
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However, I find Shadow of the Colossus’ landscape interesting because it very much has meaning. It’s just made with a lighter hand than any other game. Their purposeful restraint leaves it feeling intact but still much denser. I’d liken the feeling to finding children’s paths and hideouts in the woods – not natural, but there, and not forced-in.
I’d contrast this with the wildness of a good procedural terrain generator (No Man’s Sky, say) – there are no bounds and so I am left to wonder the bounds of the universe.
Yeah! My early hours with Zelda were mostly seeking out the towers and climbing them, then marking and activating as many shrines as I could see. I wanted to push to the edges of the continent and see the (very cool) secrets hidden on the periphery of the map.
I think the freedom of the climbing system is the single best tool here. It’s the spider ball from Metroid II with a giant 3D space. I have grown to hate climbing systems involving set interactive paths like Uncharted or Ueda games and the stamina meter as the only limitation is a good fix in my book.
I don’t really care about the fauna, enemies, or Koroks when I’m gliding and climbing around, but my experience may be unorthodox. My Link only eats mushrooms and apples, y’all.
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real talk, the overuse of this was downright embarrassing in uncharted 4, it’s not interesting at all
uncharted 4 was really wildly overrated
I’d agree with this. I see where Broco is coming from but I think the game isn’t hard enough nor the resources scarce enough to warrant you actually having an exploitive relationship with the world. I sure as shit don’t shoot all the animals I see because it takes time and I’ve got more productive things to do.
I don’t think I’ve ever intentionally killed the non-hostile animals. The way the foxes yelp is upsetting in an otherwise relaxed game.
I don’t find I need to use the cooking systems either - I just eat mushrooms raw and go to the shady grove where 50 mushrooms grow when I run out.
I wonder if it’s a failure to be able to wholly avoid systems, or a success that I can play it differently from someone playing it like Far Cry. I don’t think I’d like it better if it made me prepare and buff like Monster Hunter or the Witcher 2.
I never ever got in the habit of preparing in witcher 2 or 3 because it was always easier for me cognitively to just get better at the combat and I still feel kind of bad over it because I like the idea of the systems so much
Yeah, some of the systems feel loose to me, but in a way that’s inviting rather than broken. It’s a very pleasant game.
I think that best time I had with the game was the first 10 or so hours where I was still discovering and exploring the mechanics. It felt more flat after that, but I want to finish the game before I make too many comments about it. The whole might sit differently for me once it’s settled.
I accidentally shot a squirrel in the first hour of the game and it made me feel terrible. I thought the tail was a snake.
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now I want to know why broco has been uniquely compelled to manifest destiny
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I think the midgame in this is the worst, the early and late game are better. It starts to feel like you’re in a vapid repetitive loop and like there’s nothing actually different in the areas you haven’t explored yet. However, this impression is partly misleading. There turns out to be quite a fair amount of fresh and unique stuff left to experience (often taking the form of various outdoor Shrine Challenges), it’s just that it’s on pretty small and specific parts of the landscape in between the generic content.
I’ve finished all but the last main quest and half of the shrines, but there are still a) enemies that can one shot me (lionels) and b) things I don’t know the importance of (e.g. the three flying dragons).
Is the point of no return a hard end or can you keep playing after sealin’ the hog?
The hunting are micro-challenges you find along the way. You quickly spot, aim and fire (usually with a bomb) before the thing runs off. Also, I’m not sure where the other folks are in the game, but fruit/mushroom healing (except for Durians) doesn’t scale well to the late game. You have too many hearts and you run into fewer forest groves. Without that kind of healing in hand you’d need to do a lot of forest farming runs, or w.r.t. to combat, be very careful/good, save scum it, or avoid it. With hunting you barely swerve from your path, enjoy a small success and grab large healing items.